UNGERSKA - översättning, fakta och språkhjälp [Sammanfogad tråd]

But the relationship between Finnish and Hungarian is completely different. It only means that they belong to the same linguistical family, it is at the closest something like how the English language is related to the German language. To recognize a linguistical relationship of this kind requires linguistical expertise and is beyond the competence of a layman.

Neither Hungarian nor Finnish make any difference with the genus, although some pronouns do recognize a difference between persons and non-humans, like Finn. ketä (whom) = Hung. kit, Finn. mitä (what) = Hung. mit. Personal pronouns are similar, Finn. me (we) = Hung. mi, Finn. te (you) = Hung. ti etc. - Differences in numerals are more common, even though they are similar in all Finno-Ugric languages. Especially, in Hungarian and in Vogul the numerals resemble each other. One of the typicalities to all Finno-Ugric languages is that they use nouns in singular after a numeral.

The stress is similar in both Finnish and Hungarian, i.e. the main stress is always on the first syllable, no exception is done even when there is a long second or third syllable, e.g. magyar (read: 'mudyar, not mud'yar), huszár, Aladár ('hoosar, 'Ahludahr, not hoo'sar, Ahlu'dahr). The accent sign in Hungarian (accent aigu) is not a sign for the stress, but only for signifying the length of the vowel, - making it not uncommon for a foreigner to mispronounce Hungarian words or names by setting a stress on a syllable which simply signals the wovel length.

One of the phonetical similarities between Hungarian and Finnish is vowel harmony, met both in Finno-Ugric and Ural-Altaic languages. Words consist of either back or front vowels. Later development in Finno-Ugric languages has slightly violated this harmony because of loan words, but in suffixes it still prevails, words with back vowels append endings or affixes with back vowels and those with front vowels correspondingly with front vowel suffixes, e.g. Finn. elä-köön (long live!) = Hung. é l - j e n, Finn. anta-koon (let him give) = Hung. a d - j o n, Finn. verellä (with blood) = Hung. v é r - r e l, Finn. kala-lla (the fish [has] ..) = Hung. h a l - l a l.

A Finnish speaker, even though he does not understand Hungarian, or vice versa, a Hungarian speaker with no knowledge about Finnish, is charmed by the fact that both in Hungarian and in Finnish the vowels and consonants are evenly distributed, in contrast with Slavic or Germanic languages in which heavily packed groups of consonants could be met. Three successive consonants could be considered as a rarity and in everyday speech one of them is usually removed, "swallowed". Two consonants in the beginning of a word exist only in loanwords, and often their effect is somehow smoothed, like s c o l a in Hungarian i s k o l a, and in Finnish k o u l u. The Slavic k r a l developed in Hungarian to k i r a l y (meaning king).

http://www.histdoc.net/sounds/hungary.html